$7,000: Beckett Graded A Fake Kobe Bryant Patch?

Last month this Instagram post caught my attention:

If the caption doesn’t come through, he asks if the patch is real or fake. (To be clear, he believed it was fake.)

The comments are littered with basketball card collectors calling it out as a fake patch. Take note of these two comments:

And this:

In the top photo below, the card sells for $7,100. Then they discover that the patch was altered, label it as such, and it sells at a 60% discount (second photo).

Then someone turns around and sells it for $6,900 on eBay, without disclosing the alteration:

In fact, they called out the patch as “sick” and “rare.”

This is believed to have been the swatch prior to swapping it out, or it’s at least what the swatch should look like:

In summary:

• Buy valuable card with “napkin” swatch

• Replace swatch with “rare sick patch”

• Get it graded, because the patch won’t be assessed

• Sell for big profit

• eBay Authenticity Guarantee (completed by PSA) will not examine the patch

Yes, the cert is still active. Just like the Independence Day Ohtani that is known to be trimmed and is in a PSA slab.

And this is why you don’t sell cards you know are altered or counterfeit, even if you mark them as such. “But I told the buyer it was counterfeit!” What are the chances they’re going to buy a convincing counterfeit and not turn around and sell it without disclosing that it’s altered?

There are likely thousands of fake patches in valuable cards that have been graded by major third-party authenticators.

Be careful out there, kids.

Shoutout to mjordandagoat for the background info and screenshots.

Sidney emailed me this very strange error:

Yes, that’s Tootie Robbins on the front, and Brett Favre on the back.

Sidney tells me that he spent 20 hours going through this:

He found the weird error, and went to Google it to see what he could find out. There’s not much! He did find one other example for sale on eBay for $20:

He felt it was undervalued, so he snatched it up. According to the listing, they had 2 of them and now both have sold. So there are at least 3 out there. And if they truly had 2, it has to be more common than it seems.

So why isn’t there more information about it?

My assumption is that most people look only at the front of a Tootie Robbins card, because while he had a long career as a starter, he wasn’t someone most people would take note of. So they don’t turn it over and see Favre there.

I would guess that there are a lot of them out there, and even if people knew about it there wouldn’t be much demand for it.

Incidentally, this is what Favre’s card looks like when Tootie Robbins isn’t on the front: